A personal finance expert who appears regularly on British television launched legal action on Monday against Facebook, claiming it had published more than 50 fake posts bearing his name last year.

Facebook announced Wednesday it would begin rolling out changes to how it handles private data this week to comply with forthcoming EU rules, with European residents seeing the measures first.

A US federal judge in California ruled Monday that Facebook will have to face a class action suit over allegations it violated users' privacy by using a facial recognition tool on their photos without their explicit consent.

Facebook took out full-page ads in European newspapers Monday to trumpet tough new EU legislation that promises "more data protection for you", as the company seeks to win back trust following a damaging privacy scandal.

The new law, set to come into effect on May 25, aims to give users more control over how their personal information is stored and used online, with big fines for firms that break the rules.

Sensing the Facebook scandal has shifted the transatlantic winds, the EU is asserting itself as a forward-looking regulator rather than a retrograde bulwark against Silicon Valley's innovative might.

After years of mounting concern, the European Union will introduce tough new data protection rules next month, which Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg himself has welcomed in the face of the latest scandals. 

A Moscow court on Friday ruled to block the popular messaging app Telegram in Russia, after it refused to give state security services access to private conversations. 

Under fire for the worst privacy debacle in his company's history, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg batted away often-aggressive questioning from lawmakers who accused him of failing to protect the personal information of millions of Americans from Russians intent on upsetting the U.S. election.

During some five hours of Senate questioning Tuesday, Zuckerberg apologized several times for Facebook failures, disclosed that his company was "working with" special counsel Robert Mueller in the federal probe of Russian election interference and said it was working hard to change its own operations after the harvesting of users' private data by a data-mining company affiliated with Donald Trump's campaign.

Some of the most popular music videos on YouTube including mega-hit "Despacito" momentarily disappeared Tuesday in an apparent hacking.

Lost amid a flurry of Facebook announcements about privacy settings and data access is a much more fundamental question: Is Facebook really changing its relationship with users, or just tinkering around the edges of a deeper problem — its insatiable appetite for the data it uses to sell ads?

The popular messaging app Telegram risks being blocked in Russia after refusing demands to hand over its encryption keys to give the FSB security service access to users' data.